Parentheticals

 We are very determined to post on time this week! Hopefully you received this Sunday evening. Our Classical Conversations community had their first-quarter break this week, and it happened to be Ellie and Aelfric's fall break too, so Grandma Julie was very excited for the cousins to get together and play. The girls got to go play with Ellie on Monday, Wednesday we spent all day with them, and Thursday we all went to see the witches at Gardner Village and then went back to Grandma's house to spend the rest of the day together. It was a great fall break! Mike got a cold and was sick for a lot of the week. He doesn't usually get sick, so this was annoying. (Alison has arranged our lives so that things are OK if she's sick, but it's much harder when Mike is down!) But we made it through and he's feeling better now. Alison started getting sick Friday. She went to nature group, but she was the only adult there. Rea and Sara's friend Marissa rode her bike over, an

As I sit down to write this, I see a one-paragraph summary from last Sunday and remember Mike telling me that he couldn't remember anything from that week and did I want to write something. I guess we never did anything about that. Oops. Last week we picked apples at the bishop's house, tried to get grapes, but didn't find many. We ended up buying grapes and made nearly three gallons of grape juice. This week we picked apples at the Paynes' and made delicious apple fruit leather. Gideon loved it so much that he wanted to eat all of it, so Mike told him that if he picked and processed the apples himself, he could have all the fruit leather that came from it. It took him four days, but he ended up with fruit leather that should be ready tomorrow morning. We hope it works for him. Monday was the last day of the first quarter of Classical Conversations; we had donuts and pizza. The kids are still not unequivocally enthusiastic, but Alison still thinks it's a great thing

 We missed a few weeks again, due to General Conference throwing off all of our Sunday routines and then going on a family reunion campout and getting home late yesterday. Here's a brief overview: We went back to having school, but tried to keep everyone busy enough that we wouldn't miss video games too much. It was only moderately successful, and Alison ended up spending a day in bed due to exhaustion, so we decided to slow down a bit. We talked to the kids (mostly the boys) about how, when they moan and complain and cry that there's nothing fun in the world except video games, we feel like they need less time playing video games and more time rediscovering all of the other fun things, and they volunteered to try and stop complaining by themselves. So we're all trying to adjust. Grandma Julie and Grandma Sheila and Papa Mike, were all out of town for General Conference. But our tradition is to get together with family for conference, so Saturday afternoon and evening a